Wow, are some poor bastards still using WSDL somewhere? I thought it was long dead. Back in 2006 I wrote up a quick bit on why SOAP sucks, my experience of running a couple of Google public SOAP services. Basically none of the stuff you describe actually works. http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/whySoapSucks.html
SOAP/XML, WSDL, and related tooling are not always a walk in the park, but they certainly haven't faded into history. Indeed there are plenty of pathological cases, and overblown, tool-bound APIs designed by architecture astronauts, but it is also possible to publish and consume them in a manner just as simple and straightforward as the examples suggest. Taking just one example from my own experience, Salesforce's SOAP/XML services have proven easy to use, sensibly managed and versioned, and far quicker than hand-building structures to manage "simpler" REST.
